It might sound a little like a government agency, but Vima skips all the bureaucracy and focuses on being a pretty useful GPS-based tracking tool for runners. Its Apple Watch support makes it all the more effective.

With a fairly minimalistic approach, using Vima is a simple matter of hitting the record button on your iPhone or Apple Watch. Vima then tracks your distance, speed, altitude, and time, along with providing you with a map of where you’ve been. That’s all fairly standard stuff for this app, but Vima has the benefit of being so simple and fast, that you can just get on with your run, rather than spend time setting things up.

In the free version, it saves the last 10 ten runs so you can view the history of how you’re progressing. It’s clearly laid out again plus, if you’re a premium member, you’ve got the benefit of being able to see color coding related to how fast or slow you were running on certain routes. You can save an unlimited number of runs for a $5.99 yearly subscription, which seems pretty reasonable for the avid runner. Also included with that subscription is audio based reminders to give you a heads up on how you’re doing.

The Apple Watch integration is there, regardless of if you pay up, and it’s pretty good. It’s just a matter of hitting record and away you go, proving to be quite quick to set up. Bear in mind though, that Vima likes to keep GPS running in the background on your iPhone, sometimes for a while after you’ve finished using it. It can be a drain.

Despite that issue though, I appreciated the simplicity of it. It certainly encouraged me to pay up for a yearly subscription in future, proving to be clear, concise, and helpful.

Review disclosure: note that the product reviewed on this page may have been provided to us by the developer for the purposes of this review. Note that if the developer provides the product or not, this does not impact the review or score.